Conventional selection of advertising spots is mostly dependent on the experience of advertising agency personnel, and selection has mostly been manually performed. However, in recent years, advertising media have diversified, and selecting which vehicles to place advertisements in from among these respective advertising media can be very complicated.
As a reflection of these circumstances, various support tools for advertising spot selection have already been proposed to ease the workload for advertising agency personnel. For example, Japanese Patent Application Kokai Publication No. (JP-A) 2002-24525 proposes a method and system for selecting advertising spots across a number of advertising media, in which, on the basis of data on the probability of contact between consumers and each advertising media, advertising spots are sequentially selected for each advertising media type within the limits of acquisition cost, so as to maximize total contact probability divided by the acquisition cost for the advertising spot.
The method for selecting advertising spots illustrated in JP-A 2002-24525 is what is called a “reach preferred” type: the method gives top priority to the efficiency with which an advertisement reaches consumers. Increasing the number of times that an advertisement reaches consumers is expected to indirectly improve the corresponding advertising effect of a particular brand.
However, advertisers tend to be dissatisfied with the indirect advertising effect that can be achieved using this “reach preferred” method of selecting advertising spots, and tend to prefer advertising spot selections that are expected to produce a reliable advertising effect
Thus, advertising agencies must present advertisers with a plan for selecting advertising spots that improves the advertising effect, instead of one that simply exposes a large audience to the advertisement. Moreover, in order to persuade advertisers, advertising agencies must also prepare data that backs up the advertising effect.